A few years back my Grandfather, an avid yard-saler, sent me a set of these comics courses from the 50’s mainly put together by Coulton Waugh but featuring lots of articles by now-legendary cartoonists including Frank King, Ernie Bushmiller and others. Here is an article by Frank King, creator of Gasoline Alley. Click the images to zoom in. Reproduced with kind permission from the Art Instruction Schools (www.artinstructionschools.edu).

They said it couldn’t be done, well actually no one said that, usually they said, ‘whenever you’re ready.’ So I’m ready, sort of. Stumbling in past the deadline, the first of my monthly mini-comic ongoing series of mayhem and possibly non-mayhem related themes also. “Flotage”

Scroll down through my blog a bit and you will find some earlier pages from this book in progress, it was shelved for awhile and now has been reborn out the ashes basically because it’s the one comic book project I have that is closest to completion. That said it wasn’t all that close to completion, basically all the linework was done and needed to be filled. I have decided to go the photoshop route and my rough process is illustrated here, beginning with filling areas with solid shades, picking out highlights and shadows and then starting to work texture effects into it. My intention is to give a ‘hand-made’ look to the finished art which is working in some parts but other pages the texture gets distracting, I’m thinking it needs a little variety in types of texture and a balance of textured areas and flat shaded areas.

It’s a fun project but it’s also very time consuming and I’m starting to feel restless with it, perhaps coincidentally when it requires the most intense concentration: bringing to completion.